President Donald Trump’s administration is packed with personnel from the ranks of the hard right who use harmful ideologies as a foundation for current policies. The criticism of many appointees has focused on their white nationalist and overtly bigoted views. One ideologue returning to the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) has faced less scrutiny from the media, however, despite her role in the antigovernment movement and advocacy for county supremacy, a foundational belief of the movement. In March, Wyoming attorney Karen Budd-Falen accepted an offer from the current administration to return to the agency as the DOI’s associate deputy secretary. During Trump’s first administration, she served as the agency’s deputy solicitor for wildlife and parks. Her return to the DOI places one of the most notorious promoters of county supremacy in the upper echelons of leadership at the agency managing more than 500 million acres of public lands. County supremacy maintains that all political power should rest at the county level. It also serves as the ideological bridge that brings together the antigovernment and anti-environmental movements. Since the 1990s, Budd-Falen has made her reputation and career from working at that intersection. She’s told county governments that if they adopt their own ordinances and resource plans based on her ideas, they can demand equal footing with the federal government. According to some reports, upward of 200 counties throughout the West adopted these county supremacy ideas as policy during the 1990s. After fighting with federal land agencies and partnering with antigovernment extremists for decades, Budd-Falen now assumes the No. 3 position in the DOI. She now helps set the tone for an agency she has sued frequently over the years, including pursuing racketeering charges against employees of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), a part of the DOI. After decades working at the nexus of the antigovernment and anti-environmental movements, proposing illegitimate legal theories that routinely lose in courts, and ratcheting up anger and targeting federal land managers, Budd-Falen now has the power of a federal agency behind her. “When you side with armed militia groups and support anti-public land zealots, you are not qualified [to lead the BLM],” Western Values Project’s Chris Saeger said when Budd-Falen received her DOI position during the first Trump administration.
via splc: Leading county supremacy advocate now a high-ranking Interior official